BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY

BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; New Fields for the Supercomputer

By LAWRENCE M. FISHER, Special to The New York Times

Published: June 28, 1989

SAN FRANCISCO, June 27—
Using a supercomputer to process a payroll or to make hotel reservations may sound a bit like using a sledgehammer to kill ants, but in fact these exotic machines are showing some real advantages for many business tasks.

Once the exclusive domain of scientists and engineers, supercomputing is moving into more conventional commercial applications like the management of rental-car reservations and the development of financial models as well as the processing of transactions like credit card charges.

These are the classic uses of large mainframe computers, which excel in moving and sorting large volumes of data. Supercomputers specialize in performing mathematically intensive processing operations to solve very complex problems rapidly.

But both users and producers are finding that the supercomputer technology called parallel processing, in which tasks are broken up and distributed among multiple computer processors, accelerates some business software as well as it does scientific programs. Parallel processing overcomes the speed limits of individual processors; theoretically, four processors handle a problem almost four times as fast as one. 'Scared a Lot of People'

''It's just become reasonable recently for people to develop data base software on parallel processors,'' said David DeWitt, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin. ''Before, you had to go out and start your own hardware company as Teradata did, and that scared a lot of people off.''

Mr. DeWitt noted that Tandem Computers Inc., a pioneer in the use of multiple processors, has rewritten portions of its Non-Stop SQL data base software to run in parallel, and that the International Business Machines Corporation is taking a similar approach to its mainframe data base product, DB-2.

Some simple parallel systems have been used in business since the early 1980's, but the announcement last week by the Oracle Corporation that it would write a version of its leading data base software for a machine with more than 8,000 processors was a kind of watershed for the technology. Oracle's relational data base program, which can find sets of related records simultaneously, is used by thousands of companies in a range of industries.

''A number of large Oracle customers are extremely interested in the commercial use of supercomputers,'' said Peter Tierney, Oracle's vice president for marketing, explaining why Oracle will produce software for supercomputers made by Ncube, which is based in Beaverton, Ore.

Mr. Tierney said that the first customers would probably be in the petroleum and military industries, which are already big supercomputer users, but that there was also interest from financial service, transportation and hospitality companies.

Jeffrey Canin, an independent supercomputer analyst in San Francisco, said: ''Parallel processing is not a controversial issue anymore. Companies with the credibility of Oracle blessing this architecture will make it safe for other kinds of applications.''

There is ample precedent for supercomputers moving into the commercial arena. Nearly every new computer architecture has first been adopted by the scientific community, which is more willing to take risks to gain performance, and then by business. Perhaps the best example is the Digital Equipment Corporation's Vax minicomputer, which started as an engineer's tool but became a successful general-purpose computer.

Indeed, Gordon Bell, the chief designer of the Vax and now a vice president with the Ardent Computer Corporation, said parallel processing would gradually take over commercial computing. ''It's happening in the technical areas and there's no reason it won't happen in commercial areas,'' he said. Only the conservatism of commercial users and their investment in existing software would slow the change, he said.

But some analysts are skeptical, noting that converting software to run on a parallel system is not easy, even for scientific users. Within the broad field of parallel processing, machines run from four to eight processors to as many as 64,000 in ''massively parallel'' systems, and some may be better suited to business than others.

''It is going to be a number of years before true parallel processing machines are really considered mainstream architecture,'' said Gary Smaby, an analyst with Needham & Company in Minneapolis. ''There are certain types of problems that can be broken up very cleanly across multiple processors, but most common programs don't lend themselves to that.''

Most analysts say the machines most likely to gain a foothold in the commercial market are the so-called mini-supercomputers, typically priced from $300,000 to $1 million, rather than true supercomputers like those of Cray Research Inc., which range in price from $5 million to $25 million. A Cray spokesman said that while the company's machines were sometimes used to run commercial software, they were not bought for that purpose. He added that Cray was not aiming for that market.